Day 30: Designing a Logo

Designing a logo is a common task in Adobe Illustrator. In this final project, we will sum up what we have learnt so far in Illustrator to create your own custom logo. I will show you the process in drawing a logo and hopefully you have more confidence after this tutorial.

Drawing the Honey Farm Logo

First scan the sketch of your logo and save it as a jpeg.

Next, we need import it to Illustrator. Go File>Place and select your picture. Make sure Template is checked to place it as a template. When you open your Layers Palette. You will see that it is locked and the colors are faded out. This makes it perfect for tracing.

We will start with the bee’s body. Draw an oval shape. Edit the points using the Direct Selection Tool to form the body of the bee.

Next, draw a cirlce shapes for the head. Edit the points to make it slightly pointed.

To draw the antennae, I use an oval and draw a thick line using Pen Tool connecting to it.

Next, draw 2 ovals and rotate it to form the wings. Select the bigger wing and press Ctrl/Command+C to copy. Press Ctrl/Command+F to paste infront. Now, hold Shift and select the small wing. Open up your Pathfinder (Window>Pathfinder) and hold Alt/Option as you select Subtract from shape area.

The overlapping part of the wing will be subtracted.

We will move on to create the body stripes. Draw 2 rectangles with the height of the stripe thickness.

Select both rectangles and go Effect>Warp>Arc. Set Bend to 23% to bend the rectangle. Go Object>Expand Appearance to expand the effect.

Rotate the stripes and place it over the bee. Copy the the bee’s body by pressing Ctrl/Command+C. Then paste it infront by pressing Ctrl/Command+F. Select the body’s copy and stripes and right click to select Make Clipping Mask. This will hide the extruding areas.

Select the Polygon Tool and hold Shift as your drag a polygon on the canvas. Hold Alt/Option and drag the first polygon to make another copy of it. Do this until you have 3 copies of it.

Select all 3 polygons and swap it to black fill. Then group it by pressing Ctrl/Command+G.

We will now crop away the overlapping areas of the polygons. Select the bee’s body and go Object>Path>Offset Path and set the Offset value to 10pt. Send the new path to the top by pressing Ctrl+Shift+] / Command+Shift+].

Select both the offset path and polygons and open up your Pathfinder (Window>Pathfinder). Hold Alt/Option as you select Subtract from shape area.

Final Touch ups

Finally, we will add in the text for our final logo. Notice I have increased the strokes for the bee’s body to make sure that the line doesn’t fade out when printing. Also zoom out to see whether it still looks clear and sharp when it is small. Print out a copy at different sizes to see how it will look in letterheads and continue tweaking until you are satisfied.

Cleaning up the Logo

Once I am happy with my logo, I will start cleaning up my logo. Save a copy of your logo so that you still have the original copy to work with if you need to make any adjustments. Now select your text and outline it by pressing Ctrl+Shift+O / Command+Shift+O to convert it to paths. This will prevent missing fonts on other computers.

Next, select the bee stripes and go Pathfinder and select Trim to trim away the edges.

Select the paths of your bee that are made contains line strokes and go Object>Expand and click OK. We will need to expand it to maintain the same stroke thickness or else the proportions get distorted when we rescale the logo.

After we expanded the bee, hold Shift and select the bee stripes. Go Pathfinder and hold Alt/Option as your select Add to shape area. This will combine the bee shapes together.

Finally, we will add in the colors for the logo and we are logo is done.

Thank you so much for this whole collection of tutorials. I feel that I’ve just gotten a fairly good grasp of this program in just 2 days. If only there were tutorials like this for all other design programs.

So this is a really nice read, but.. Considering the company is called Honey Farm, I worry about how most people would read this logo. My bet is atleast 75% would think the company was called Farm Honey. It looks really nice though 🙂

… That’s actually a pretty bad logo. The fonts are ones recognized pretty much as a do-not-use (yes this happens) and the drawing is sub par. It’s pretty clear this artist dosn’t know much about typography since it’s given such a smal- scratch that, NO mention (other than “then I added text”) Type is NOT a “Final Touch Up.” This logo could easily be good in CONCEPT but the execution was poor.

Thanks very very much!. This is a fantastic tutorial. Thanks for taking your time to do it. I first thought that Illustrator was such a great monster (and it is, after all), but then i learn that it wasn’t impossible anyway.
Congratulations!

Beautiful end result and very simple process. I also like that it works for print, too. I’ve been dying to start using Illustrator more, so I’m definitely going to go back through the rest. Thanks a bunch for this!

It’s a tutorial… doesn’t need the nasty comments from people like “John Smith”. It won’t teach someone typography or the importance of kerning, or how to DESIGN, but it teaches the production process and that’s the part a lot of people get tripped up on.

We are LogoProDesign as a Custom Logo Designer, We checked your artwork collections. Those are amazed us. Thanks for that type of good work collections. We regularly checked your website for good artwork example.
Thanks
David Thomas

k, so after I create my offset path of bees body, I can’t get it to go to front/top. I know this because 1) I can’t see it, even though I make outline in black and 2) when I subtract the shape area, the honeycombs are outlined and not subtracted. I’ve tried now for an hour- I’m getting tired of it now. Does anyone know how to help or what I am doing wrong? Thanks!

We are LogoProDesign as a Creative Logo Designer, We checked your artwork collections. Those are amazed us. Thanks for that type of good work collections. We regularly checked your website for good artwork example.
Thanks
David Thomas

Today, I went to the beach with my children.
I found a sea shell and gave it to my 4 year old daughter and said “You can hear the ocean if you put this to your ear.” She placed
the shell to her ear and screamed. There was a hermit crab
inside and it pinched her ear. She never wants to go back!
LoL I know this is completely off topic but I had to tell someone!

Hello there, just became aware of your blog through Google, and found that it’s really informative. I am gonna watch out for brussels. I will be grateful if you continue this in future. Many people will be benefited from your writing. Cheers!

Hello there, just became aware of your blog through Google, and found that it's really informative. I am gonna watch out for brussels. I will be grateful if you continue this in future. Many people will be benefited from your writing. Cheers!

Today, I went to the beach with my children.
I found a sea shell and gave it to my 4 year old daughter and said "You can hear the ocean if you put this to your ear." She placed
the shell to her ear and screamed. There was a hermit crab
inside and it pinched her ear. She never wants to go back!
LoL I know this is completely off topic but I had to tell someone!

I checked your artwork collections. Those are amazed me. Thanks for that type of good
work collections. I regularly checked your website for good artwork example.
good blog, i will be back soon
Thanks
Binky.

Nikki

Bill

Interesting tutorial. I was searching on the web for some illustrative mascot designs depicting a bee and stumbled upon your site. As far as my designing skills go, even though I tried following the steps in this tutorial, my final character design came out odd somehow. My bee looks more like a strawberry. I decided to seek a professional designing site instead at www.mascotdesigncorner.com and the end product came out better than expected. They managed to realize what I want in the character design. For the price I paid it was a steal as well. I guess I am not the suited for designing but thanks for the tutorial anyway. On the bright side, at least I had fun doing it.

john

We are LogoProDesign as a Creative Logo Designer, We checked your artwork collections. Those are amazed us. Thanks for that type of good work collections. We regularly checked your website for good artwork example.
Thanks
David Thomas

Dan Huffman

k, so after I create my offset path of bees body, I can't get it to go to front/top. I know this because 1) I can't see it, even though I make outline in black and 2) when I subtract the shape area, the honeycombs are outlined and not subtracted. I've tried now for an hour- I'm getting tired of it now. Does anyone know how to help or what I am doing wrong? Thanks!

We are LogoProDesign as a Custom Logo Designer, We checked your artwork collections. Those are amazed us. Thanks for that type of good work collections. We regularly checked your website for good artwork example.
Thanks
David Thomas

anna

It's a tutorial... doesn't need the nasty comments from people like "John Smith". It won't teach someone typography or the importance of kerning, or how to DESIGN, but it teaches the production process and that's the part a lot of people get tripped up on.
Thanks for the tutorial, you had some nice tips.

rabiya ganatra

Beautiful end result and very simple process. I also like that it works for print, too. I've been dying to start using Illustrator more, so I'm definitely going to go back through the rest. Thanks a bunch for this!

Bronwyn Vourtis

Juan Ignacios Anapios

Thanks very very much!. This is a fantastic tutorial. Thanks for taking your time to do it. I first thought that Illustrator was such a great monster (and it is, after all), but then i learn that it wasn't impossible anyway.
Congratulations!

Oli

Oli

... That's actually a pretty bad logo. The fonts are ones recognized pretty much as a do-not-use (yes this happens) and the drawing is sub par. It's pretty clear this artist dosn't know much about typography since it's given such a smal- scratch that, NO mention (other than "then I added text") Type is NOT a "Final Touch Up." This logo could easily be good in CONCEPT but the execution was poor.

Stobs

So this is a really nice read, but.. Considering the company is called Honey Farm, I worry about how most people would read this logo. My bet is atleast 75% would think the company was called Farm Honey. It looks really nice though :)

hendra

Brandon

Thank you so much for this whole collection of tutorials. I feel that I've just gotten a fairly good grasp of this program in just 2 days. If only there were tutorials like this for all other design programs.

jd

I followed your directions for clipping mask, and it's not working for me. I don't know what i'm doing wrong. Here's what i did:
1. made an oval
2. made the stripes
3. selected the oval and stripes
4. right click and select clipping mask
The body and one of the stripes disappears, clipping just one stripe.
Help!

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